Brad Thor - The Athena Project

“What can you tell me about the canister?” Tracy asked as the truck bounced along the rutted jungle road.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” said Naylor. “I’m not a bomb guy.”

“How do you think it got to where you found it?”

“I think one of the terrorist groups training in the area put it there. It could be AQ, Hamas, anybody.”

“Why would they just leave it out in the middle of the jungle?”

Naylor shrugged. “I know. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“There were dead bodies near it as well?”

“Bodies, vehicles. There’s a ton of weird stuff.”

“Do you think it caused the death of the people you found?” she asked.

“You mean is it some sort of chem/bio weapon? I don’t think so. What happened to these people is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“So what’s this all about?”

Naylor adjusted the air conditioning and looked into the rearview mirror at Tracy. “I assume that’s what you’re here to help figure out.”

They drove as far into the jungle as they could and then stopped. Naylor had wanted to hire some Guaranis to act as porters but Walsh had been against it. He wanted their visit kept quiet-the fewer people who knew, the better. This, of course, meant that they were going to have to carry all of their own gear.

They removed everything from the vehicles and loaded it into their packs. Weapons were then distributed to everyone with military training, which meant everyone but Leslie Paxton. Jack told her he’d give her a weapon if she wanted one, but Leslie politely declined. “I’m not a soldier,” she said. “I’m a scientist.”

After camouflaging the vehicles, they struck off into the jungle on foot. It had rained earlier and the ground was muddy. It made for slow going.

The SF men took turns scouting forward and circling back to make sure they weren’t being followed. They were intense professionals who took their job very seriously. As far as they were concerned, this was hostile territory and they expected to be attacked. It was easy to hope for the best as long as you were prepared for the worst.

Two hours later, they came to the beginning of the old, abandoned road. Naylor showed them the pavers and explained that they were getting close.

They followed the winding path down into the wide gully. Leslie had her Flipcam out and was taking high-definition video of everything.

When they reached the enormous stones, the team stopped so that she could investigate them.

After shrugging off his pack, Naylor walked over and joined her. “Pretty impressive, aren’t they?”

“Incredible,” she responded.

“Look at these,” he said, leading her over to the strange symbols he had seen carved into the stones on his first visit. “What do you make of them?”

“They’re runes.”

“As in Viking letters?”

“Kind of,” said Paxton as she zoomed her camera in for a close-up. “What you see here are symbols used in Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet. The Scandinavians used something different called futhark. This isn’t futhark. This is definitely Germanic.”

“How’d they get here?”

“I don’t know for sure,” she said.

It was obvious she had some sort of an idea, but if she wasn’t going to offer up her hypothesis, Naylor was enough of a professional not to press her for it.

“Do you want to see the rest?” he asked her.

“Absolutely,” said Paxton as she finished filming and followed him over to where they had set down their packs.

They took a few minutes to hydrate and rest before moving on. When they were ready, they reshouldered their gear and headed down into the valley.

Naylor had nicknamed it the “valley of death.” It was dark, cold, and there wasn’t a single living thing in it. Not only could you not see much sunlight filtering through the thick canopy of trees high above, but just like last time, there wasn’t a single bird, monkey, or any other kind of animal making any sound. It was abnormal. Jungles were usually teeming with life. Here, there was just dead silence, dead bodies, and something that looked very much like a bomb.

The valley floor spread out before them. It was choked and overgrown with vegetation. Up ahead, he could see the hulks of the overturned vehicles. “Two o’clock,” he said to the rest of the team. “That’s the first truck from my report.”

“Where’s the canister?” asked Tracy.

“About 250 yards farther.”

Tracy looked at Jack Walsh. “I want to see it before we look at anything else.”

The Pentagon man nodded and Naylor led the way. Fifty yards in, he stopped and pointed. “It’s over there,” he said. As Tracy started to walk toward it, he put a hand on her arm, “So are the bodies.”

“I’m a big girl,” she replied. “I can handle it.”

Naylor doubted it. Even he had been repulsed by what he had seen, and he was a doctor. He let her go.

The SF men fanned out to form a perimeter as Tracy closed the distance with the canister.

The call from Jack Walsh had come out of the blue. Tracy hadn’t spoken with him in almost a year. When he told her what he needed, she thought he was pulling her leg. He wanted her to travel to South America with him to check out a possible bomb. Only Jack Walsh could call someone out of the blue and make that kind of request.

He said it was hard to get to; that they would have to hike in and carry all of their equipment on their backs. It was then that Tracy knew why he had asked her. Jack Walsh’s assignment sounded very much like a suicide operation. And Tracy Hastings was the perfect candidate.

Yes, she had no doubt that Walsh respected her for her abilities. She was a fantastic EOD tech, but he’d be hard-pressed to find someone on such short notice willing to go in with everything but a protective bomb suit. At sixty to seventy pounds, no one was going to be able to carry all the tools they needed and a bomb suit. It just wasn’t going to happen. The other factor, the fact that this assignment could very well end up killing her, was something she found almost appealing. It wasn’t necessarily the danger she was drawn to, but rather the potential that this could end everything.

After her accident and medical discharge from the Navy, Tracy had spent a lot of time getting her life back together and learning to live with her disfigurement. Then she had met someone. He was handsome, exciting, kind, and very funny. He was also former Navy, just like her. His name was Scot Harvath, and they had been perfect for each other.

He had just moved into a new house, a former Anglican church near Mount Vernon, overlooking the Potomac. They hadn’t been dating long, and on a whim, he had called her in New York to come down to see it. She booked a seat on the last shuttle of the night and picked up Italian on the way back from the airport.

They ate picnic-style in front of the rectory’s old fireplace. The next morning, she let him sleep in. With a cup of coffee in her hand, she had stepped outside to pick some of the flowers growing wild near the front door. It was a warm summer morning. Someone had left a package. She bent down and that was the last thing she remembered before being shot.

The gunman was carrying out a vendetta; preying on the people closest to Scot. She had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but at least she had survived. That was the bright side friends insisted on emphasizing with her. They had no idea how piercing the headaches that she suffered almost daily were. The only relief was when she was heavily medicated. It was no way to go through life. No way at all.